I just lost seven games of Candyland in a row to my kids last night. Seven games!
It’s not fair, I tell you. I never get to take Rainbow Trail or Gumdrop Pass. I always have to go the long way. I’m the one who always gets Plumpy or Mr. Mint when I’m in the lead. Why can’t someone else ever get them? It’s not fair! Oh sure, I picked Queen Frostine that one time. Should I have been happy about this? I would have been if I hadn’t been stuck in goddamn Gooey Gumdrops at the time!! How long does it take to draw a yellow card anyway? Shouldn’t the law of averages be on my side? Noooo – green card, can’t move…red card, can’t move. It’s a conspiracy. I know it is.
Well I’ve had enough, dammit. From now on it’s gonna be nothing but Chutes and Ladders in this house. If you don’t like it, tough.
my son is now nearly 17. When we played Candyland, it was the total world to him. Once, the phone rang while we were playing, he ran to get it to say “I’m sorry, my mom can’t come to the phone right now, she’s too busy playing Candyland”.
(pause to allow some readers to say “aaaawwwwwwwwwwwwww” and others to vomit, depending on sensabilities)>
I’m pleased to say this will never happen to me. I win almost every game I play 95% of the time, unless I deliberately throw the game.
Snakes ‘n’ Ladders, Chess (and all its wacky variants), cards, Risk, Civilization, Monopoly, Talisman, whatever. The only thing that people can regularly challenge me in is Scrabble, and that’s because I never get to play more than once a year (and the person who wins plays 2 or 3 nights a week).
Aw, how sweet, letting the kids win, and such a good loser daddy!
???
Mr. Mint?
Plumpy?
Queen Frostine???
My gawd, it’s been years since I’ve played CandyLand.
Evidently I have the “Dark Ages Edition” with only the colors and no exciting characters (only some lame-o gingerbread guy standing next to a lollipop).
I must have the same ancient edition of Candyland as screech-owl (notice how I blame it on the game and not our age). I’ve never heard of these characters.
Ike – I have, in fact, wondered just what the heck is the deal with Lord Licorice. My kids only know that he is “the bad guy.” What has this world come to, that a game as innocent as Candyland needs a bad guy? Is it so that the little gingerbread people can chase him up a mountaintop and cause him to be hurled to his painful doom, ala most Disney movies?
screech-owl and Grace – Yeah, I never heard of these characters until I had kids. The game I remember from my childhood looked like this one, with just pictures of various candy-themed places. The new game came out in the '80s I think, looks like this, and includes characters that inhabit each of the places (Gloppy in Molasses Swamp, Mr. Mint in the Candy Cane Forest, etc.).
I’m a little weirded out by some of the characters (just what the heck is Lord Licorice supposed to be doing, lounging there in the middle of the board with no card or square to hint at his sinister purpose) but my kids like 'em, so I resist the urge to tell them “In my day, we didn’t have any of these fancy characters. In my day we traipsed through Candyland by our damn selves. That’s the way it was and we liked it!”
I discovered that I could mix my daughter’s favorite thing, playing Candy Land, with mine, Drinking Beer. Thus creating a near perfect drinking game. It has all of the right compoents, rules that a 3 year old or stumbling idiot can understand and random punishments.
Now that she is 9 and gambling properly, we can usually show a profit after an evening with my freinds playnig cards. Some complain that her not drinking is like cheating. Yeah, suck it up buddy!
I have never played Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders. I was the youngest and I think the games were all destroyed by the time I was around. Last year I saw in a grocery store here in NYC a game called (no kidding) Kosher Land, a Jewish childs first game. I really wanted to buy it but my wife wouldn’t let me. The fact that I was laughing out loud at the game made her worry that some people would think I was a Nazi or something.
Recently when playing with my niece, I discovered that Chutes and Ladders is possibly the most boring game on the planet. No strategy at all. Just roll, move, and attempt to prevent said cherubic niece from cheating. After a very short time I was so desperate for the game to end that I was hoping she would cheat.
Slightly off subject, but when I was 7, I had the biggest thing for the enchanted princess. (Sorry, I can’t remember her official title…) Early warning signs of a bisexual lifestyle perhaps?
I have never heard of any of these newfangled characters, either.
I really disapointed that the METRIC – the changeover game I had as a child never achieved such status as Candyland or Chutes-n-Ladders. Oh well.
My three year old is now addicted to Candyland, and prone to beg for games periodically throughout the day. We had one game where all the cards that shoot you to the end were drawn at the right after we started, but before anyone could win, we starting drawing the cards that send you to the beginning of the game. We re-shuffled the deck three times before someone won. I couldn’t take it much longer. I was ready to throw the game.
I should have followed my dads lead and taught her blackjack. Like Ukulele Ike’s kids, I didn’t see my allowance for more than a few hours until I was 12. To this day, I hate gambling.
My parents didn’t play for money - but they did only play games that involved at least some level of strategy, and they played to win. We never even came close, (Congrats you just beat us 500 to 30, 45, and 25 for the fourth time in a row. So what that our hands aren’t actually big enough to hold the cards…)
My sister and I were strictly forbidden from playing anything for money or making bets that might result in monetary gain on anything until our brother was at least 12 years old. Prior to those rules, we tended to think of a quick game of something as a minor inconvenience that needed to be dealt with in order to get to his money.
